"We are pleased to say Ashley Madison has been able to secure our sites, and close the unauthorised access points.

The company are working with law enforcement agencies, which are investigating this criminal act. Any and all parties responsible for this act of cyber-terrorism will be held responsible."

The "paid-delete" option offered by AshleyMadison.com removes all information related to a member's profile and communications activity. The process involves a hard-delete of a requesting user's profile, including the removal of posted pictures and all messages sent to other system users' email boxes.

As our customers' privacy is of the utmost concern to us, we are now offering our full-delete option free to any member, in light of today's news.

The group behind the hack, The Impact Team said they stole the company's data because of their issue with Ashley Madison's "full delete" feature that is supposed to give users the opportunity to wipe their information from the site.

“Users almost always pay with credit card; their purchase details are not removed as promised, and include real name and address, which is of course the most important information the users want removed.”

So far, "maps of internal company servers, employee network account information, company bank account data and salary information" has been leaked

The hackers' statement continues:

“Too bad for those men, they’re cheating dirtbags and deserve no such discretion.

“Too bad for ALM, you promised secrecy but didn’t deliver. We’ve got the complete set of profiles in our DB dumps, and we’ll release them soon if Ashley Madison stays online. And with over 37 million members, mostly from the US and Canada, a significant percentage of the population is about to have a very bad day, including many rich and powerful people.”